Attention shoppers: Finding your way through 'Huckabees' can be demanding

By WILLIAM ARNOLD, SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER MOVIE CRITIC

Published 10:00 pm, Thursday, October 7, 2004

David O. Russell's new movie, "I ? Huckabees," may be the most ambitious big-star comedy since "Bulworth." It's a movie that sets out to define, in a totally outrageous but well thought-out form, the philosophical conflicts of man at the outset of the 21st century.

Its problem is that its reach way exceeds its grasp. Despite a consistent tone of all-out absurdity, it's a very demanding movie, and its goofiness is never inspired or laugh-out-loud funny enough to carry us along on its leap of imagination.

The hero of Russell's indescribable story is Albert (Jason Schwartzman), a young poet and environmental activist who, obsessed by the coincidence of running into the same stranger three times in a row, goes to an "existential" detective agency for help.

The husband-and-wife detective team (Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin), New Agers who believe everything in the cosmos is interrelated, proceed to follow every move Albert makes over the next few days to see what, if anything, the coincidence means.

Their investigation affects not only Albert but also Tommy (Mark Wahlberg), a troubled firefighter; Brad (Jude Law), a hustling sales executive for the Huckabees chain stores; and Dawn (Naomi Watts), Brad's bimbo-ish girlfriend and Huckabees "spokesmodel."

There's also Caterine (Isabelle Huppert), a French author who was once a protégé of the philosopher-detectives but has abandoned their optimistic view of the universe to embrace a selfish nihilism that maintains everything is "random and cruel."

As the characters move back and forth between these two forces battling for their souls, the movie touches all of the concerns of the anti-establishment cinema and stands as a fairly clever satire of the way Corporate America has corrupted the environmental movement by embracing it.

But "Huckabees" is really broader and more expansive than this. It's both a political and a religious movie that is telling us that the human species has reached the point in its evolution where its political choices must now hinge on its philosophical vision of the universe.

The world has shrunk so small that we're being forced to choose between a Taoist view of interconnectedness of all things and a selfish-nihilist view of non-connection. Like Luke Skywalker, Russell's characters are torn between the light and dark side of the Force.

It's very rare when a major movie full of name stars attempts something this grandiose, and it also has some pretty funny shtick to recommend it, sparked by the best showings of Hoffman and Tomlin in ages, and maybe Wahlberg's best performance ever.

Yet the movie does not really come off. Russell ("Flirting With Disaster," "Three Kings") has plenty of vision, intelligence and gall but he doesn't quite have the steady hand and comic flair that a masterpiece-wannabe such as this demands.

It's so incorrigibly intellectual that you can't keep up with it, and it's never funny enough to make you want to try. It aims at the originality and wit of an "Annie Hall" and "Modern Times," but delivers mostly pratfalls and the usual deadpan absurdity.